


A Compilation of Little Women meta

by Beth Harker (Beth_Harker)



Category: Little Women Series - Louisa May Alcott
Genre: Fandom Meta - Freeform, Gen, Meta Essays, archived from tumblr blog icouldwritebooks, non-fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-15
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-19 11:19:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17000604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beth_Harker/pseuds/Beth%20Harker
Summary: Tumblr isn't a reliable place to host stuff, and the word on the street is that AO3 welcomes fandom meta as well as fic. Here you will find a compilation of headcanons and mini essays on Little Women related topics, crossposted from my blog.





	1. Chapter 1

**Preface**

AO3 accepts meta. I like writing it. I've noticed that one or two things I've posted in the past have seemingly disappeared from my blog, so I'm reposting any meta or headcanons lists that I spent a significant amount of time on here. The titles of each chapter will let any interested readers know what category of essay or headcanons to expect.


	2. Jo March, sexuality, and Gender

**Anonymous asked**

**Maybe you're only used to talk about newsies headcanons here, but do you think Jo is a trans man, a lesbian or just a straight "tomboy" girl who just finds femininity boring, unfair and makes women weak? I mean something between tomboy and feminine**

 

You wanted an essay in response to this, right? Anyway, I’m going to break it down into pieces and overanalyze everything to death, because that’s how I do things.

**Is Jo March a lesbian?**

Maybe! Jo March as a butch lesbian is very appealing, and there’s textual support. At one point in the book she talks about wishing she could marry Meg, to keep her in the family. People who use that as an excuse to ship Jo with Meg or any of her sisters gross me out, so let’s not go there. Jo’s a character who, for all her dash and dare, hates change an upheaval. Jo talks about marrying Meg because the idea of her running off with John Brook and changing the entire family dynamic is upsetting to her. Still, it could say something that marrying another girl is the first solution that jumps into Jo’s mind.

There’s also a ton of pop culture support for lesbian Jo March. I’ve seen her pop up many a time on lists of literary lesbians. A lot of this hinges on the idea that Jo is Louisa May Alcott’s author insert. Louisa May Alcott is quoted as saying, “ I have fallen in love in my life with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.” In so many ways, Jo is Louisa and Louisa is Jo. It stands to reason that if Louisa was prone to falling in love with pretty girls and not men, then Jo was the same.

**Is Jo March a trans man?**

Maybe! There’s actually more textual support for this than for lesbian Jo. Also, it doesn’t hinge on a throwaway quote about him wanting to marry his own sister, thank goodness. Without taking out my copy of the book, I’m pretty sure that Jo refers to himself as the man of the house in the very first chapter of the book. He talks about wishing he was a boy more than once. After he cuts off his hair, he mentions how he can now run away with Laurie, and anybody who wants to find them will have to advertise for two missing boys. He writes volumes of plays in which he mainly gets to stomp around in men’s boots and play men’s roles. He chooses to be called a masculine version of his given name. He takes on a male persona for the Pickwick Papers (as do all the March sisters, but you’ll never convince me that Jo wasn’t the ringleader). Jo has a certain speech pattern that was recognized as male in the Victorian era, namely that he tends to leave the first word off sentences (“I never take advice. I don’t have to.” would sound more feminine in Victorian lit than “Never take advice. Don’t have to.” Jo says a lot more of the second kind of sentence. Also, he curses.).

By the second half of Little Women, and into the sequels, Jo presents in a more feminine way, but it’s not like he gets a lot of choice. In general, Jo is a character who really ties himself in knots trying to change himself and overcome his own personality. This is a character who destroys all of his writing because professor Bhaer suggests that it’s not moral enough, and who seems to get punished in ridiculous ways by the text every time he steps out of line (usually with his sisters nearly _dying_ ). Adult Jo performing femininity more than teenage Jo makes sense given the kind of book that Little Women is and the time when it was written, but it definitely seems like he would have been happier if things hadn’t had to go that way. Given Jo’s penchant for wanting to help and guide young men (aka his entire role in the Little Women sequels), I could definitely see modern AU as an out trans man who works as a mentor for trans youth.

**Other genders and sexualities?**

A bunch of them could apply! Maybe Jo is ace (notes: the whole “be kind to spinsters” bit, Nan from the sequels being a mirror of Jo and seeming really ace). Maybe Jo is bi. Maybe the thing we are interpreting here is a children’s book from 1868, and that makes it really hard to say. Jo could somehow be every letter in the LGBTQA acronym at once, except a lot of the words that made up that acronym didn’t even exist back then in the way that they do today, and even if they did, it was hardly like Jo was going to come out and say them.

**What about Jo’s marriage???**

The story of how Jo ended up married to Professor Bhaer is really interesting. The first and second half of Little Women were published as two separate books. After the first half, Louisa May Alcott and her publishers were inundated with letters from readers who wanted to see Jo marry Laurie. Louisa had wanted to make Jo as spinster writer, like herself, and she insisted that she would not marry Jo to Laurie to please anybody. But then her publishers insisted that Jo and Laurie get married, so she had them do just that, but not to each other. In an epic defiance of her publishers and the Jo/Laurie shippers she had Laurie marry Amy. She then created a “funny match” for Jo in the person of Professor Bhaer. Their marriage was shown to very much be a partnership rather than a torrid romance (and Louisa could write the hell out of torrid romances, so if she’d wanted that for Jo, it would have been there).

 

In the sequels she then created Nan (who was very pointedly similar to Jo) and Tommy (who was very pointedly similar to Laurie). She had them play out a scenario that was very similar to the whole Jo/Laurie thing, only Nan got to remain gloriously single, and this was presented as the best thing ever.

I bring this up to say that Jo’s marriage to her stalwart professor doesn’t really need to be a hurdle in how one interprets the gender/sexuality of the character. Maybe Jo is a lesbian who married one of her best guy friends and decided to run a school with him and also have his babies. Maybe Jo was bi. Maybe Jo was a gay trans man. It all works, pretty much. Or, you know, you could go with the whole straight tomboy dealing with crappy compulsory gender norms thing.

**In conclusion**

I think having multiple interpretations of Jo March floating around is actually more important than readers reaching a consensus on Jo’s gender and sexuality. Little Women is public domain at this point, and Jo is a very important and iconic character. There could be entire books written with a not straight Jo, and those things could be up there with Wide Sargasso Sea in terms of being meaningful and well regarded literary reinterpretations. Or imagine how important a film with an explicitly trans Jo could be. On a smaller scale, wouldn’t it be nice if there was at least as much fan work out there featuring an LGBTQA Jo as there is fanwork shipping her with Laurie? 

Seeing themselves in a favorite character can be important to a lot of people, so I don’t want to say that Jo is definitely anything, and take the character away from somebody who might really want Jo to be like them. I think there’s room for a lot of versions of Jo March, and it’s something that deserves to be played with more.


	3. Little Women as a masterclass in writing character flaws

I feel like Little Women is like a master class on how to write characters who are deeply flawed, while also being good people.

 

Let’s start with Jo, the hero of our story. She’s amazing! She’s kind, funny, talented, and so full of love and loyalty for her family. Even so, she has this terrible temper. We get to see it through out the book, and even while we can usually understand and sympathize with what is making her angry, we get to see her do bad things because of it and make mistakes that have genuine consequences, like not telling Amy about the thin ice when she and Laurie are out skating, and how that almost results in Amy’s death.

 

Then there’s Laurie. The book follows him from the age of fifteen up through his twenties. As with Jo, we get to see so many moments of intense kindness from him, and we get to see how he comes to fall in love with Jo, and a pretty big percentage of readers end up really wanting

Laurie and Jo to end up together. Then, when she rejects him, we get to see him come very close to becoming a friend zoned jerkwad to end all friend zoned jerkwads. Really! He has a whole melodramatic conversation with his grandpa about how Jo can’t stop him from staring tragically after her and pointedly and aggressively moping in her general vicinity, presumably forever, and then we get grandpa telling him that if he respects her at all he won’t do that, and literally sending him out of the country. A+ parenting there. Once out of the country, Laurie goes wrong for a bit, but he comes back able to love and respect Jo as a friend, just like she wants from him. Satisfying character arc there. Good life lesson.

 

Speaking of Laurie’s grandfather, isn’t it cool how he had such a big falling out with Laurie’s father (his son) that he didn’t see him before he died, and goes on to work so hard to understand Laurie, and make sure that no similar rift appears between them?

 

A lot of books, when it comes to romances, end when the characters get married, and don’t go into the trials and difficulties that go into making a marriage work. Not Little Women! Meg’s fatal flaw is her vanity, and a lot of times the troubles she gets into because of this are likely to come off as sanctimonious to a modern audience (she wore a borrowed dress at a party??? How dare she???), but one part with her that I found to be really nicely handled was the segment where, after her marriage, she buys that bolt of fabric that she and John can’t afford, and then the two of them need to talk together and work it out. There’s also the part where John accidentally insults her by bringing home unexpected guests on the wrong day, and they fight about that, but manage to figure things out. Good stuff.

 

Amy is vain and spiteful in addition to being artistic and sensitive.

 

Beth is described in terms of being near angelic, but she’s so socially anxious that she can barely leave the house, and has closer relationships with her dolls than she does with most people, even well into her teens.


	4. Beth March headcanons

\- One of the reasons that Beth and Jo get along so well is that they both have trouble interacting with people, and they both have some degree of social anxiety. This manifests itself differently in the two sisters. While Jo is full of dash and bluster and reacts to stressful situations with clumsy overcompensation, Beth just hides.

\- Beth referred to Jo as her brother for years, because Jo asked her to. Even though some people teased Beth about it, she kept it up out of loyalty until Jo told her to do otherwise.

\- Nobody baffles Beth quite so much as Amy. When Amy was a small baby, Beth loved to help take care of her, and would spend hours upon hours humming lullabies by her cradle, but Amy became so worldly so quickly that Beth didn’t know what to do about it, and felt quite left behind.

\- At a very young age Amy tried to convince Beth to become a concert pianist, claiming that Beth’s talent was the reason for her being alive in the first place. Amy forgot this conversation, but Beth never did. She always wondered if she was selfish or delusional for only playing the piano for herself and her family.

Beth shied away from most forms of attention, but her sisters’ praise was very dear to her.

\- Beth hated talking to people outside of her family, but she also hated to see others ostracized or uncomfortable, so she’ always was the first to go up to somebody who she perceived as an outcast.

\- The stories that Beth created in her head about her dolls were as involved as anything Jo ever wrote down, albeit less dramatic. She told some of them to Jo, but not to anybody else, and later in her life Jo used the things that Beth had told her in some of her writing.

\- Beth 100% supported Jo’s sensation novels. Even if Jo were to write the most graphic and horrible thing imaginable, Beth would love it.

\- Beth had a full on near death experience the first time she had scarlet fever, with tunnels and everything. It was a nice one, but she never found the words to talk about it.

\- Beth once made a throwaway comment about hoping she would die on a Sunday, and then she did.

\- Beth tried to fall in love with Laurie. She wanted to fall in love with someone, and Laurie seemed the most likely candidate, but she couldn’t make herself feel anything more than sisterly affection for him. In attempting to make herself attracted to him, Beth did however notice how tall he was getting, and how he needed to shave, and a whole host of indications that he was growing up that can be easy to miss in a childhood friend that one has known for years. This caused something of an emotional crises for Beth.

\- Turning eighteen also caused somewhat of an emotional crises for Beth, as did turning nineteen. She began to realize that she was growing up, but felt wholly unprepared. It wasn’t so much that she still saw herself as a child at this point. She didn’t really see herself as much of anything at all.

\- Beth often wished that she was a cat… Just a nice little one who slept by the fire, and purred, and curled up next to people when they were sad or lonely. She told Jo, who asked her if she would like to catch mice, thereby ending that fantasy.

\- Beth was terrified of mice and rats, but she made a practiced effort at liking that one rat who kept Jo company when she wrote.

\- Jo could often be found writing in the early evening as the sun was setting, and since she could never be counted upon to light an oil lamp on her own, Beth would usually do so, kiss Jo on the cheek, and then leave her to her feverish writing.

\- Beth encouraged Laurie to propose to Jo. The two of them spent a lot of time together while Jo was away in New York.

\- Beth learned to speak really late. She was about four years old. Her parents worried, but not too much, as she seemed quite happy and affectionate.

\- Beth learned how to do basic sewing before she learned how to speak, and she learned the basics on her piano as well.

\- Beth always loved the smell of garlic. When she was little she would try to rub the cloves on her wrist as perfume whenever she helped Hannah in the kitchen. She was quickly told not to, and given a little bottle of rose oil to use as perfume. She gave the bottle to Meg, but also stopped with the garlic.

\- After her first day day of school, Beth cried. Her parents managed to convince her to go again got a second day, but then she locked herself in a closet. Dropping out of school in kindergarten was the most headstrong thing that Beth ever managed to do.

\- She tried to become a vegetarian once, but became very faint and anemic, and had to stop.

\- For a while after she recovered from scarlet fever, Beth would sometimes practice sitting and moving very quietly, and pretending she was a ghost. She made the mistake of telling this to Meg, who promptly started crying.

\- When Meg was pregnant, Beth found herself looking at her a lot, and wishing that she could be pregnant and bring children into the world as well. She thought she might make a good mother, as long as she had a worldly and outgoing husband to bring the children places.

\- Beth was fascinated by the dying process, even though it was her own death. She took careful observation of the small changes in her body as she got ready to leave the world. She talked to Jo about it a little. It was hard for Jo, but Jo was the only one in the family who could make herself listen without breaking down.


End file.
